Monday, July 15, 2024

Using a carrier proteome approach to "amplify" pericardial fluid proteins!

 


The importance of this new paper can be better appreciated after some quick google searches. Something like "what is pericardial fluid and how do you extract it" is a good start.


You use imaging based approaches to guide a microbiopsy needle into SOMEONE'S BEATING HEART and you remove some fluid. Ideally there is NEITHER A LOT OF SPARE FLUID not DO YOU WANT TO TAKE A LOT OF EXTRA SAMPLE OUT. 

You are - quite hopefully - very sample limited here. So what this group did was TMT label the peptides from a pool of some fluids to use it as their "carrier" and then TMT labeled individual fluids. We know that too much carrier messes with quan, so they carefully optimize the levels to get a lot of IDs but without compromising their quantification accuracy by too much. 

I am required by a new blog rule to point out (thank you reviewer #1 for a paper just accepted today (wooo!) that using a labeled sample to increase your odds of detecting samples in a body fluid is the premise behind the TMTCalibrator, which pre-dates the preprint of SCoPE-MS by about a year. 

As you might be able to tell from the aforementioned "googling", I am no expert in pericardial fluids and I didn't have time to become one on possibly the hottest single day I've ever personally experiences (heat index of 116F? On an isolated wooded mountain in Pennsyltucky?) poor day to mow my grass. I might have broke my brain. But these people are and they seem very happy with the biological applications of their large relative increase in numbers of identifications. 

I'm happy for them, because this is a cool approach and - if I was going to have pericardial fluid removed for some nerds to do proteomics - I'd want them to take as little as possible. I

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